How Safe Are School Meals, Parents Wonder

The rash of food scares in recent months has made some educators and
parents wonder whether they can be sure the government-issued victuals
in the national school lunch program are fit for consumption.

"We are extremely wary of the stuff now," said Pat Spencer, a
spokesman for the Los Angeles school district, which inoculated 9,000
students and adults last spring after discovering that fruit cups
students had consumed were linked to a shipment of frozen strawberries
that caused an outbreak of hepatitis A in several Michigan schools.

Then last month, the nation's second-largest district was forced to
discard chicken stored in school freezers after federal officials said
the poultry contained unacceptable levels of dioxin, a highly toxic
chemical compound. Students had already consumed eight tons of the
poultry.

"This kind of stuff is happening every time we turn around," Mr.
Spencer said.

The increase in what used to be once-in-a-blue-moon occurrences now
has consumer groups blaming an outdated federal food-inspection system
that they claim is ill-equipped to prevent new strains of resistant
bacteria from entering the food supply.

Moreover, by the time the entrees and side dishes are plopped onto
the lunch tray, most school lunch commodities have traveled a lengthy
route, providing numerous entry points for contamination as well as
making it hard to identify the site of contamination.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the federal
lunch program that serves 26 million children each school day, said
that the tainted chicken patties it supplied to schools in 33 states
last winter originated from a Mississippi animal feed company that
mixed clay containing dioxin with chicken feed to prevent clumping. No
students in Los Angeles or any other district have gotten sick from the
spoiled meat, which USDA officials said posed no serious health threat
because the levels were so low that only repeated exposure over time
would cause serious illness.

Federal officials have traced the infected strawberries that were
transported to schools in six states last spring to a California food
processor that they say illegally imported the Mexican-grown fruit. But
federal agencies are still investigating at what point in the
process--from the fields to the lunch table--the fruit was
contaminated.

That inability to pinpoint the source of the exposure and to
eradicate the virus or bacteria before the tainted food reaches the
school cafeteria has prompted some parents around the country to pull
their children from the school lunch program in the past year.

"A lot of parents were really concerned and weren't letting their
kids eat," said Joan Van Voorst, a parent at Hughes Elementary School
in Marshall, Mich., where several students fell ill from eating the
spoiled berries. "There was a higher sack-lunch rate," she
said.

The Route

Twenty percent of the food in the national school lunch program,
which offers meals to needy children for free or a reduced price as
well as to other students for full price, is supplied directly through
the USDA commodities program. Districts buy the remainder of their
groceries themselves and are reimbursed by the USDA for all the food
that the children eligible for free or reduced lunches eat.

Every year, the USDA chooses the crop of commodities it will send to
schools based on nutritional needs and market factors, and food
manufacturers bid for the contract. In turn, these contractors order
ground-beef patties and turkey breasts from the slaughterhouses and buy
green peas, peaches, and corn--items on this year's USDA list--from
farms.

The food is then processed, packaged, and delivered to a handful of
regional sites across the country, where the products are usually
stored in warehouses until trucks shuttle them to local schools.

All along the route, the USDA requires various safety precautions,
from labeling and coding packages to maintaining specific temperatures
in the refrigerated trucks. Meat- and poultry-processing plants are
inspected nearly every day, the USDA said. Other kinds of food plants
are inspected every five to 10 years.

Once the food arrives at schools, food-service workers are supposed
to abide by strict safety and sanitation rules laid down by the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration.

The FDA requires that schools follow a set of guidelines from
purchasing to storage to preparation that are more rigorous than those
used for restaurants, said Suzanne Rigby, the director of nutrition and
education for the Alexandria, Va.-based American School Food Service
Association, a membership organization with 65,000 food-service
workers. While a diner can order a steak medium-rare at a restaurant,
for example, hamburgers served in schools must be thoroughly cooked,
Ms. Rigby said. Well-cooked foods are less likely to harbor parasites
or bacteria, she explained.

FDA officials also say that one of the simplest and best ways to
prevent food-borne illness is for food workers to practice good
hygiene.

While school food handlers are not suspected of having caused the
recent outbreak of hepatitis A, the mild liver infection--which can
cause fever, vomiting, and fatigue--is most often transmitted by
handling or consuming fecal-contaminated food or water.

So before serving meals to students, food handlers are required to
wash their hands with soapy water and scrub for 20 seconds. They must
also wear clean clothing and hair restraints.

Although not all school food-service workers abide by these sanitary
measures consistently, Ms. Rigby said she is confident that the current
rules are more than adequate to ensure that children are receiving
wholesome meals.

"I don't care where my child eats--even in my own kitchen there's a
risk factor," Ms. Rigby said. "But I feel safer with my kids eating in
the schools than probably any other place."

'New Bugs'

USDA officials stress that the spate of reports of tainted food in
no way diminishes the integrity of the school meals program.

"People should be acutely aware that the food supply that goes to
schools is safe, and that every precaution is taken to protect
children," Shirley Watkins, the undersecretary for food, nutrition, and
consumer services for the USDA, said in an interview last week.

Experts at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
who have been tracing the source of the outbreaks suggest that the
recent food scares both in the schools and the general food supply may
be due, in part, to changing environmental factors.

While tainted strawberries and spoiled chicken were the only
products that made their way onto school lunch trays, 25 million pounds
of beef infected with the E.coli bacterium were recalled from
supermarkets and restaurants last month. And hundreds of people were
sickened by bacteria-infected raw oysters, and 66 children and adults
got sick from drinking unpasteurized apple juice tainted with E.coli
this summer.

"There are new bugs out there," said Dr. Lawrence Bachorik, an FDA
spokesman who attributes the recent outbreaks to more resistant strains
of bacteria--such as the E.coli found in the beef patties--that didn't
exist 10 to 20 years ago.

In addition to these more virulent pathogens, increasing amounts of
imported food products may also have contributed to the recent rise in
food-borne illnesses, Dr. Bachorik said.

The CDC estimates that 9,000 people die from food-related illness,
and millions more get sick each year. The government does not keep
track of how many students or staff members are sickened by eating at
school.

Some consumer groups contend that the recent incidents demonstrate
that many more safeguards are needed to guarantee the integrity of the
U.S. food supply.

Oversight of the nation's food is spread among several regulatory
agencies, which makes the system unwieldy and inefficient, argued
Caroline Smith DeWaal, the director of food safety for the Center for
Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group based in Washington.
The USDA, FDA, CDC, and Environmental Protection Agency all have a hand
in food regulation, she said, meaning more germs could potentially slip
through the bureaucratic cracks.

"There are too many holes in the food-safety net that let bacteria
into the food supply," Ms. DeWaal said.

Although the amount of food imported into the United States has
doubled in the past five years, there has been no real parallel
increase in inspectors, she added. Currently, the federal government
inspects from 2 percent to 10 percent of all food imports, according to
the USDA. Some processing plants, such as those that produce canned
fruit or soup, for example, are inspected only once a decade.

The USDA requires that school lunch products be homegrown, but the
Mexican strawberries that arrived in schools show the need for stricter
controls, Ms. DeWaal contended.

Bolstering Safety

Dane Bernard, a vice president of the Washington-based National Food
Processors Association, said last week that the industry is about to
implement new, government-mandated accountability measures to better
track foods from "farm to fork."

"We think the food supply is safe, but that doesn't mean there can't
be some improvements," he said.

In the past year, the government has also stepped up efforts to
bolster food safety. The FDA announced last month that it plans to put
warning labels on unpasteurized apple juice.

And the Clinton administration asked Congress this year to authorize
a $43 million food-safety initiative that would improve food-monitoring
and -inspection procedures. The measure would also subsidize research
to identify new, faster ways of detecting food pathogens and would
underwrite research to find better ways to prevent food poisoning. The
plan, if approved, would also expand food-safety education efforts to
consumers and food-service workers.

Some districts, however, are still planning to take extra
precautions by conducting their own monitoring of government-issued
edibles.

"We are probably going to be doing some of our testing as this stuff
comes in," said Mr. Spencer of the Los Angeles district, which runs the
largest school lunch program in the nation.

But Louis Giannunzio, the superintendent of the Marshall, Mich.,
schools, where 100 children took ill from eating tainted strawberries
last spring, doesn't plan to make any big changes in the meals
program.

Though there's been a 10 percent decline in student participation in
the district's lunch program so far this fall--which may be due in part
to a price hike--the administrator expects public confidence to rebound
soon.

"Probably some parents are still reluctant to sign kids up for
lunch," Mr. Giannunzio said. "But most will give it another
chance."

The University of Arkansas, Iowa State University, and Kansas State
University operate the Food
Safety Consortium to disseminate up-to-date information on the
beef, pork, and poultry industries. It includes links to media reports
and USDA information on the Hudson Foods beef
recall.

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